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It’s not unusual to think that there’s never been a Mac OS feature that Microsoft didn’t try to imitate. Of course, this is not to say that Apple is above cribbing a few features from others when it’s appropriate.

Take the the Mac’s Help menu or, for that matter, the application switching technique, both of which didn’t originate with Apple. But that’s beside the point. You see, the next great operating system war will be between Mac OS 10.6, known as Snow Leopard and Windows 7. The former is due to arrive next summer, the latter by 2010.

May the best product win.

For Apple, Snow Leopard will supposedly be a step back, the better to fix the plumbing and clean up the dead wood. Although system requirements haven’t been officially announced, it has been reported unofficially that it’s Intel only, which seems to make sense since the planned improvements would seem to impact the x86 processor architecture to a far greater extent.

It certainly is a good idea to offload processor tasks to the graphics chips, which is one key reason why the new MacBooks are using NVIDIA parts rather than the pathetic integrated graphics from Intel. Since all recent Macs other than the original entry-level Intel-based Mac mini use processors with two or four cores, making the operating system more aware of such things is a huge plus.

Its hard to keep track of which interface goodies came from Apple, which came from Microsoft, and which were there at the beginning with Xerox PARC. It used to pretty much one-directional Apple to Microsoft until Windows 95 brought Alt-Tab application switching and the little visual arrow to differentiate an alias (shortcut in Windows speak) from a regular icon.

Sometimes these copied elements come over intact, as they usually do when Apple implements something from Windows like in the two examples above, but sometimes it just gets goofy. I mean, common, Recycle Bin? Once you empty it, its trash, gone forever, thrown away, no new plastic bottle coming out of your old plastic toy.